Re: Math on the web without MathML (CSS 2.1 rendering for HTML and XML)

David Carlisle said:
>
> by "reasonable xml syntax" I meant pretty much any SGML markup, so all
> of those.

Well I never could imagine that when you write "reasonable xml syntax" you
can mean XML, SGML, or even HTML. Sorry, I have not developed telepathic
capabilities yet.

> If you have some CSS that can display matrices and
> superscripts from some  markup of that form, that would be interesting.
> I have yet to see any CSS that can achieve that from reasonable markup.
> As I said you can obviously put each character in a span on its own and
> absolutely position that character, but that isn't really feasible
> unless you are machine generating the markup.

Machine generation of the kind is usual in MathML, SVG... no problem here:

LaTeX ==> p-MathML

LaTeX ==> abspos-CSS

> If you just scale the characters then it soon becomes unusable.

I have seen CSS techniques for matrices without composed brackets not
scaling of single characters. What is the problem here?

> Any proposal for mathematical typesetting even if only "web
> quality" rather than TeX typeset quality needs to be able to typeset at
> least matrices and superscripts, surely?

This appeal to TeX quality is really odd. The web is not about visual
quality (the ppp of best monitors is very inferior to any average
printer). The web is about content, online access to remote information,
multimedia, and hipertext. First fulfill those requirements and then focus
on TeX visual quality.

It is very amazing to read the repeated mantra about the (claimed) virtual
TeX quality achieved by MathML for online mathematics, whereas is
sistematically ignored that qualities for aural rendering, "semantics",
and structural markup of the MathML code one get from the web each day are
so low that very old approaches as HTML 3 can do often a better work.

> David


Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

Received on Thursday, 13 July 2006 11:43:31 UTC